I’m sharing this old article because it’s useful to contrast the situation back then (protests against hate speech) and now (protests due to the APIcalypse).
Here are a few highlights:
- Back then, the admins were already eager to shift their discourse back and forth, depending on the convenience. Reddit was always about free speech, then it never was.
- Former CEO Yishan Wong’s “[shutting down subreddits] won’t become a regular occurrence”
- If you try to follow the link sourcing the quote above, you’ll notice that most Reddit blog official communications towards users are gone. Instead you’ll find a blog clearly geared towards investors, vulture capital, and corporate.
Any other old piece of news that you guys feel like sharing, that can be contextualised to show Reddit going downhill?
I recognize that illustration: https://old.reddit.com/r/Stand/
Peak Reddit
“We stand for free speech. This means we are not going to ban distasteful subreddits. We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it. Not because that’s the law in the United States — because as many people have pointed out, privately-owned forums are under no obligation to uphold it — but because we believe in that ideal independently, and that’s what we want to promote on our platform. We are clarifying that now because in the past it wasn’t clear, and (to be honest) in the past we were not completely independent and there were other pressures acting on Reddit. Now it’s just Reddit, and we serve the community, we serve the ideals of free speech, and we hope to ultimately be a universal platform for human discourse.”
Aaron Swartz never really cared about an IPO
He probably didn’t but I wonder how much of a role he had on the “corporate culture” of Reddit Inc. Probably close to zero, regardless of his contribution to the platform as a whole - let’s say that things like “information should be widely available, specially scientific knowledge” aren’t exactly too popular with vulture capital.
How about we call that leech capital instead? They’re trying to profit at the cost of a good user experience.
“Leech capital” sounds good. They’d gladly suck the blood out of society for their own profit.
I usually call them “vulture capital” for the wordplay (vulture vs. venture). And because they’re a lot like vultures: they fly on circles around anything moribund, in groups, almost as if asking each other “is it dead yet? can we rip off its flesh?”
I like vultures so I don’t like the association with one of my favorite animals. Leeches are 100% known for being parasites though.
I dunno… Reddit didn’t turn corporate until the Condé Nast sale. Prior to that, things seemed very laissez-faire (for better and worse).
I remember they made a giant deal about hiring a new admin and the office looked like someone’s (large) apartment in photos.
Not that jailbait represented the spirit of Aaron Swartz, but the company wrestled with decisions about silencing communities and I appreciate that
The fact that they sold Reddit to Condé Nast is on its own a sign that they were already corporation-minded. Otherwise they’d simply say “nah, we thank you for the offer but we see Reddit as a public service, not as a business”. That’s likely what Swartz would’ve done.
Also the fact that kn0thing remained in Reddit a long time after it was bought, and that Greedy Pigboy is still there as its CEO.
